Breathe
by deanine
Summary: A surgeon learns the ABC's of life early on. Airway. Breathing. Circulation. Saving a life starts with giving a breath more often than not. One, two, three, four... Breathe.


**Breathe**

**Author's note:**

It's almost always a mistake to write in present tense or first person. This fic willfully makes both mistakes. It should have two follow ups if I decide to write them. Also, there is quite a lot of dodgy pseudo-science in here. I'm no physicist/chemist/ecologist. There is a bit of faking, vague glossing over, with a dash of what I learned in chemistry a decade ago.

* * *

><p><strong>Part 1 - Phytoplankton<strong>

It all started with the phytoplankton. Ask any of the serious, stuffy fellows on the telly and that's where they will inevitably begin. Not that the beginning matters so much now. The phytoplankton died, the ocean died, and it's getting rather hard to breathe on planet Earth.

Clever monkeys that we are, we don't just accept the inevitable and wait for death when the oxygen starts to drop. It isn't that hard to manufacture oxygen. Any middle-schooler with a battery, some electrodes and some salt water, can do it. Achieving the efficiency of an ocean of photosynthesizing plankton, is another matter. We're still working on that.

My flatmate actually attacks the oxygen puzzle the day it hits the news about the plankton dying. The biologists and ecologist are talking about salvaging the situation, saving the fish and the whales and restarting the damaged ecosystem.

Sherlock gets that look in his eyes, that manically joyful expression that heralds a puzzle in progress. Neither an ecologist or a marine biologist, he is a gifted chemist. He storms off to Maplin and returns with five sacks of electronics. He sends me out to buy ten different types of salt. Within a week, he has the working prototype for an oxygen generating portable respirator.

He sends the plans to Mycroft without even being asked. It's almost five years before people really need them, but when they do, they're there.

It works beautifully, though the smell of chlorine keeps the air from ever feeling properly fresh. I'm not complaining, breathing is a luxury these days, and I'm thankful for each chlorinated lung full. I do miss walking down the street, a cool breeze on my face, the freedom to just roam without checking the respirator battery or water level or salinity.

When I see other people wearing their government-issue respirators, I'm unreasonably proud of Sherlock and the time he bought all of us with his cleverness.

If the restriction of the respirator bothers Sherlock, he doesn't much let on. Survival is a puzzle for him, and he works at it constantly when not distracted by a criminal case. We are the proud owners of a set of UV lights (courtesy of a friendly neighborhood pot-grower), four lovely bean stalks, two plum trees and a tomato vine. Considering that Sherlock had heretofore murdered every flower, vine or fichus that I brought home, his gardening skills surprise me at first.

His refusal to consider leaving London doesn't surprise me at all. Now that breathing has been solved, at least for the moment, the next crisis will be starvation. The animals, the insects, everything that respires is dead or dying. Crops are already failing to fruit without insects to pollinate.

Mycroft estimates that the shortages will become serious in six months, critical in a year. He tries to strong-arm his brother into leaving the city for a more secure location, but Sherlock won't entertain the thought of abandoning London. When Mycroft tells him that everyone in London will be starving in a year, Sherlock agrees and introduces him to their newly sprouted bean plants.

The elder Holmes laughs then, laughs until he cries. It isn't right, the British government crying like that, but it is the end of the world. Allowances can be made.

Mycroft sends us the potted tomato vine and the plum trees a week later.

I put my foot down when I find Sherlock pricing bee hives online. Sharing our flat with plants is one thing, stinging insects another entirely. Later I'll wish I hadn't stopped him. He would have found a way to make them fit into the tiny ecosystem he is building, and maybe he could have saved them, one hive of bees alive and pollinating the lonely bean plants behind our sofa. I envision Sherlock fitting the bees with their own tiny respirators. It's a passing fancy, but I wish I'd let him try.

Instead of bees, we pollinate our peas by hand, with painstaking care.

The surgery still opens six days a week and I still work part time. People still get colds and gout and an impressive number of patients are clinically depressed. Never in all my days, have I written so many prescriptions for Zoloft and Paxil and Wellbutrin. I wonder how long before the anti-anxiety drugs are in as short supply as oxygen.

Walking home, breathing my chlorinated air, I try to ignore the smell of death that lurks everywhere: cats, dogs, rats, birds. So many dead things in so many nooks and crannies, rotting away, releasing methane, hydrogen sulfide, and carbon dioxide. It would be nice if putrefaction released oxygen as a biproduct.

I know we should leave London before things get worse, before the decay is causing disease, before the people get so desperate and scared and stupid that they start destroying things, but Sherlock just won't leave and though there aren't any locks on the door keeping me here, I can't just leave him.

Mrs. Hudson's flat is silent. She long since relocated to her sister's home in the country. I hope she is safe, with plenty of food and that the air is a little sweeter where she is. Inside our flat, Sherlock is carefully tying the growing bean stalk onto the trellis he erected behind the sofa.

Mycroft couldn't convince him to leave. Now I have to try. Sherlock's eyes disappear behind the glare of his respirator's mask, and I feel ill equipped for the conversation. I open my mouth to argue a case for leaving, but the words don't come. The world is dying. Whether they die in a bolt hole with Mycroft, ten years down the road or in a year when London can no longer feed itself, doesn't really matter.

John just wants to spend that time with his friend.

"We're out of milk," Sherlock informs me without looking up from his project.

"The world is out of cows," I reply. "Or didn't you notice?"

"Quite right." Sherlock smiles and motions me over. "We have a bean pod."

I crouch next to him to admire our farming success, and smile for the first time in days. It's a stubby, immature pod that might one day produce three measly beans, but we made it together and I'm ridiculously proud as only a lifelong city dweller can be when faced with such a modest victory. "We should name it," I announce. "Poddy?"

Sherlock groans. "John, no, we mustn't become sentimental about the beans. We're going to eat the beans. Name something else, the vine perhaps?"

I open a bottle of wine and we name the entire garden together. Sherlock ends up choosing most of the names, composers and scientists, significant names. He lets me name the tomato though-Emily. When he asks me to justify my choice, I shake my head at him. "You named the beans and the plums, a bunch of names I'll be hard pressed to pronounce, much less remember. Emily is a pretty name for a pretty vine." I hold up two fingers. "Two syllables not fifteen."

He takes my wine glass, a frown on his face, deducing me. "Three syllables, John." He starts fiddling with my respirator. "The salinity is off. You're not getting enough oxygen. You have to check this every twelve hours. Do you want to suffocate?"

I'm far too sleepy to argue or defend myself. He carefully adds water until the balance is adequate, and snaps the reservoir lid shut with perhaps more force than necessary. I grimace, becoming more alert as the air flow increases. "Sorry, I checked it before work. Then you showed me our first beans, and the celebration distracted me."

Sherlock's frown darkens. "Get distracted from breathing too often, John, and you'll be very sorry. Or maybe you won't. It would be an easy exit. Quite a few people have chosen to get drunk and let their respirators fail. They just go to sleep, and never wake up."

"I'm not ready to check out. It was an honest mistake. Forgive me?" I ask.

Sherlock drops onto the sofa next to me and pulls his knees up to his chin. "Of course, just be more careful." He looks at me, the serious expression on his face, vaguely distorted by the plexiglass of his mask. "Do you want to go hide in Mycroft's bolt hole? If you really want to, we can go. We can take the plants with us. I know you've become attached."

"We would both hate it there," I reply. "I don't want to die hiding in a hole."

"We aren't going to die either place, John. Trust me. Survival is just another puzzle, another game. Do you trust me?"

Breathing the chlorine-smelling air and gazing at our small apartment garden, I believe him. And I'm fairly sure that hypoxia and drunkenness are only minor factors in that faith.


End file.
